Thousands will visit the Mai Po Nature Reserve in November and December for the 12th annual series of charity wolks around the wetland. Lew Young, 46, is the reserve's manager.
The survey this week that found more than half of Hong Kong children have never walked barefoot through grass doesn't really come as a surprise at all. We get lots of schoolchildren coming to visit Mai Po and some of them are frightened at first when they see birds or dragonflies. It's quite a shame.
A lot of families don't have time to visit the countryside. A lot of school kids have their weekends filled with private lessons and a lot of them are under quite a lot of pressure to improve academically. For some children, parents don't have the means to take them out at weekends; their parents have to work at weekends to make ends meet.
Even if families can't get out to the country parks, urban areas should provide children with parks that have grass and not concrete. In some big parks in the city centre you aren't even allowed to walk on the grass. We ought to make urban parks more friendly for children and provide open areas where they can kick a ball around. Hong Kong doesn't have those spaces.
A lot of people want to see more green areas and more trees planted along the roads. Compared with Singapore, Hong Kong does very badly in terms of the number of trees in urban areas.
This year has been a difficult year for Mai Po. The reserve and wild birds in particular have had a lot of very negative press, first with avian flu and then with Japanese encephalitis. We need to get people to feel that Mai Po is a safe place to visit. People don't need to be afraid of being bitten by mosquitoes and they shouldn't be afraid of going out in open spaces.
It's a ridiculous situation which I think in part the media has helped create. People have got things out of proportion.
